Darlingtons Limited


Coffee distribution company Darlingtons achieves customer data and back-office system centralisation through its use of broadband technology

Best practice in: 	Broadband
Sector:			Catering
Size of firm:		24 employees
Location:		      London
Website:		www.darlingtonscoffee.co.uk

Darlingtons supplies coffee, tea and a range of accessories and ancillary products to restaurants and cafes such as Eat, Bagel Factory, the St Austell Brewery pub chain and British Airways' airport lounges.  


Objectives: 

Founded from the acquisition of an existing coffee supplier in 1995, the company has now grown its distribution network to include Hampshire, Oxford and Cornwall as well as London and plans to have a complete national network within five years.  It is this growth in the distribution chain that was the driver behind Darlingtons' adoption of broadband technology.  They recognised a need to centralise the back-office systems and the customer database in order to manage the company more efficiently and effectively as it grew.  Good communications links between the offices were essential in order for this to be achieved.  

"The decision to get broadband was driven by the need to streamline our accounting operations and information exchange between the offices as a result of our expansion to four locations," says Graham Ralph, Finance Director.  "This is a highly competitive sector with tight profit margins.  It is therefore important for us to thin down our administrative overheads and deliver strong customer service in order to be competitive and achieve our growth targets."


Solution: 

The company uses a combination of SDSL and a leased line to provide the necessary Internet connections for a Virtual Private Network (VPN).  Supplied by the internet company VIANET.WORKS and supported by the London-based company Oceanwave Digital, this provides secure access to the company's network through the VPN's encrypted channel.  The London office has upgraded from an ADSL broadband connection to SDSL.  This provides them with higher bandwidth and a lower contention ratio.


Results: 

The broadband technology and the VPN has enabled them to centralise their customer database and back-office systems on one central file server in London.  Prior to this each branch operated independently, running its own order book and accounts.  "The benefits of this centralisation include improved financial monitoring, better services for customers and greater flexibility for interchanging staff."  

Customer information is held centrally and accessed from the branch offices via the secure broadband connections.  "Orders from the branches are made directly on the central system.   Invoices are generated centrally by the system and automatically printed locally."  The benefits from this include faster response times to customers and increased efficiencies in internal operations as all the information required is immediately accessible from one place.

The centralisation of accounting information means that the need to audit four separate operations is eliminated.  Graham estimates that "with over 2,500 invoices generated each month we should be able to reduce our accounting and auditing costs by almost £30,000 per annum which is a considerable saving for us."

The time saved through the increased efficiencies of the operations as a result of centralisation is also important to Darlingtons.  "A saving of three hours a week equates to a saving of around £1,000 a year in salary costs.  There are many tasks for which we are now able to achieve that sort of saving on a regular basis.  An example is the preparation of our customer statements that used to involve collecting information from each branch.  Now that the information is all in one place the time taken to do this is reduced significantly."

The system provides greater flexibility in where work is undertaken enabling more effective sharing of work across the organisation, for example when people are on holiday.  "It has also changed the way we view the Hampshire office.  We have space and budget restrictions in the London office.  We are now able to base staff in Hampshire where previously they would have had to be based in London to have full access to our systems.  We now have a sales and marketing person based in Hampshire who would previously have had to be based in London.  This is a cost saving for us."


Challenges: 

Although the systems are now in place for Darlingtons to benefit from these efficiencies across the company, only the London and Hampshire offices are fully integrated at present. The Cornwall office is a small operation with only one person and will be integrated as it grows while the Oxford branch is waiting for ADSL to become available where their office is located, currently scheduled to be at the end of this year.  The Oxford branch currently connects to the company network via a secure dial-up ISDN connection.  "As a result of not having broadband in Oxford we are only achieving 60% of the efficiencies which we achieve in Hampshire and it takes a great deal of effort to achieve that.  Our system cannot be fully effective without broadband."


The last word: 

Whilst looking forward to the major benefits that an ADSL connection at the Oxford office will bring, the higher bandwidth and lower contention ratio provided by the SDSL connection in the London office has had a major impact on performance particularly in terms of  speed of response in peak times.  "It has made a huge difference.  The ADSL connection was absolutely fine for us initially but our requirements at our London office reached a stage where we had out grown it.  This highlights the fact that in some cases a combination of broadband solutions across an organisation may be the best approach to meeting requirements cost effectively.